Index

AMD has every reason to be happy today - the company launched its Radeon HD 6990 and it earned the title of the world’s fastest card. The card uses two Cayman XT GPUs and will churn out some seriously impressive performance.

Naturally, two chips on one card mean more heat and power as well, but this card is not for the faint of heart to begin with. Sapphire kindly provided us with its HD 6990 and we’ll briefly take a look just what the card offers.

UPDATED: We’ve managed to spend some quality time with Sapphire HD 6990 and today we’ll show the results. No, not that kind of quality time, thank you very much.

The card was launched at around €600 but you can get it today for €560 here.

As you already know, Radeon HD 6990 a.k.a. Antilles is currently the fastes graphics card around. However, Nvidia today launches its dual-GPU GTX 590 and it’s quite likely that AMD will hand over its crown. However, moving the little switch on HD 6990 results in a boost from 830MHz to 880MHz. Whether this is enough to beat the GTX 590, we’ll see soon enough.

The following GPUZ shots show performance difference with regular and OC BIOS:

In the meantime, AMD launched the new HD 6990 driver, Catalyst 11.4 preview, which brought about improvement in certain games. You may recall that dual-GPU cards were almost exclusively hindered by drivers upon launch, and the latest example of that is delayed launch of the GTX 590 due to incomplete drivers.

HD 6990’s dual BIOS was a subject of many debates, asAMD won’t officially cover the OC BIOS, i.e. the boost to 880MHz, with its warranty. However, many partners decided to side with their customers and decided to cover it with full warranty regardless of clocks.

It turned out that the card runs stable at 880MHz, so we’ve included the OC BIOS results in our tables.